Blu-ray

Even taking into account the success it's had to date, 2014 should go down as Marvel Studio's biggest and most exciting year. And not just because of the surprise Summer sci-fi smash Guardians of the Galaxy; several months earlier Marvel had turned everything fans thought they knew about its shared cinematic universe on its head with this edgy second solo outing for Captain America.

This Blu-ray release of Roman Polanski’s latest film left me shocked. Not by its rather stage-bound story or mannered performances (it’s actually an often funny film), but by the fact that it features an MPEG-2 hi-def encode. I thought those went out of fashion around the same time as Profile 1.1 Blu-ray players. The good news is that this doesn’t seem to impact on the imagery quality to any great degree, with the 2.40:1 visuals well-defined throughout. Less impressive is the flat DTS-HD MA 5.1 mix, which is firmly anchored to the front speakers.

Few writers have had as big an impact on the horror genre as Stephen King, and since the tail end of the 1970s US studios and television networks have fallen over themselves to translate his novels and short stories to the screen. We're now at the point where King has nearly 250 TV/movie writing credits to his name.

Reuniting two stars of his earlier horror smash Re-Animator (Jeffrey Combes and Barbara Crampton), Castle Freak tells the story of an American family who inherit an Italian castle. Of course, this being a horror film, the castle comes with a nasty secret in the form of a deformed freak who has been locked up in one of its basement cells for decades. And when he gets loose, there's going to be hell to pay...

Short Circuit crashes headlong into RoboCop in Neill (District 9) Blomkamp's latest sci-fi thriller. In a near future version of Johannesburg where state-of-the-art robots are used to police the streets, rogue police 'bot Chappie is given true artificial intelligence by his creator (Dev Patel), only to end up being raised on the streets by a group of gangsters.

Written and produced by Oren 'Paranormal Activity' Peli, this Hills Have Eyes rip-off follows a group of tourists who visit an abandoned town devastated by the Chernobyl meltdown, only to discover that they're not alone. While the film struggles to live up to its fascinating setting, this Blu-ray's AVC 1.85:1 1080p transfer and DTS-HD MA 5.1 soundtrack at least make sure that it looks and sounds extremely atmospheric throughout. Meagre extras take the form of a deleted scene, an alternate ending, a short 'Chernobyl Conspiracy' video, a fake ad for 'Uri's Extreme Tours' and the trailer

The glory days of the film noir were long gone by the time director Roman Polanski joined forces with screenwriter Robert Towne in 1973 to craft a gripping thriller about corruption, deceit and murder in ‘30s Los Angeles. The film they concocted became one of the defining movies of the genre – a remarkable thriller powered by astonishing performances and themes that still resonate today. Cinema rarely gets much better than this.